Articles
Essays, reviews, and commentary on literature, history, politics, and ideas.
Not Just Tuneful But True
‘A verse may find him whom a sermon flies,’ George Herbert wrote. Like the metaphysicals, Micheal O’Siadhail incorporates a great deal of learning in his verse, bringing in major figures from Europe’s intellectual and spiritual journey. But is this history…
Stepping Into The Light
Sinéad Gleeson is already known as a generous literary critic and anthologist, who has rescued the work of some shamefully neglected writers and whose perceptive author interviews are celebrations of the imagination. Now she has stepped out to shine with…
Beyond Tweedledum and Tweedledee
The thesis that there are no real differences between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael does not hold water. The two parties have significant differences of attitude and approach, and to a limited degree of ideology. If this were not the…
How Perfectly the Parts Fit
Michael Coady’s poems revolve around his home town of Carrick-on-Suir, where the river and the countryside are as essential to living as the air, but it is the presence of people, alive and dead, their relationships, memories, agreements and disagreements…
Elliptical Obit
In Ann Quin’s fictional world acts of finality or resolution repeatedly come undone. A dead bird is buried and then dug up. Plans of escape are formulated and then abandoned. A corpse is disposed of and returns. Tissues of falsehood…
Then Again, Pat Boran
In a poem about O’Connell Street’s Spire, the monument becomes a dagger, a skewer, an extended middle finger. None of the names are inclusive of us, the citizens; the Spire is the ‘we’ reduced to ‘I’, which might be seen…
An Unbaptised Saint
It seems appropriate that Simone Weil was buried between a cemetery’s Jewish and Catholic sections. Ultimately, belonging in any sense provoked in her an allergic reaction. She was Christian but not wholly Catholic, and perhaps also, as a Platonist, Catholic…
Among the Dead Men
JG Farrell had a curiosity that spanned various cultures and periods, a wicked sense of fun, a keen, unrelenting eye for the hypocrisy of particularly English manners of discourse and an understanding of the military and class basis of imperial…
Stranger Danger
Stoker’s Count Dracula and Joyce’s Lipoti Virag are both dangerous intruders, the former threatening to infect the English with vampirism, the latter subverting the Irish moral order. Both writers were engaging with a contemporary worry about Eastern European immigration.
On the Waves of the Surreal
Some Irish modernists – Flann O’Brien most obviously – have incorporated surreal elements in their fiction. The tradition has recently received a boost through the work of the Moscow-born and Dublin-based writer, editor, translator and publisher, Anatoly Kudryavitsky.
Betrayal
We should be sceptical when great powers tell us a region is riven by age-old, unresolvable conflicts and hatreds. This was the kind of mystification that in 1938 supplied Britain and France with an excuse to abandon their ally Czechoslovakia,…
Turn On, Tune In, Help Out
The aim of any left-wing project worth its name surely has to be human emancipation. Perhaps the real strength of Corbynism might turn out to be its ability to incubate a new radical political culture rather than discovering a new…